I, Cassandra

44 | RYAN MADDOX

It has to be now. Right now. If I don't do it now, it won't happen, and everything will be fucked. An hour ago, de Pommier's avatar turned up in the war room and hasn't left even though the general has been with Blue almost every waking moment these last three months.

I know by the way de Pommier's avatar is eyeing me she's realised her order to decommission me later today has been scrubbed. I run a quick scan. No new order, at least not in the system. I sense this time the order was issued 'in person' or at least as close to that could be with her. They will come for me at any moment, take me away, extract my memories, and leave me to burn.

But I can tell she's not sure, so she leaves me to keep working, her desire to extract every last particle of value out of me superseding her caution. At least this much I have to my advantage. I keep cool and pretend ignorance to what I know she intends to do to me. To Blue.

Blue thinks me and Miro are coming with her to Mars. I know the truth. She's been led to believe these things to keep her working hard, so she is motivated, and believes every effort she makes will give her the advantage she needs to terraform Mars and create a new life for herself with me and Miro. I have seen the numbers. They can't afford the luxury to send me and Miro with her when they have had to leave so many brilliant minds behind to perish. Besides, Miro would never survive the trip. It would be cruel and impractical to send a cat to Mars. But Blue has nothing else to cling to, so she doesn't even consider the impossibility of it, or maybe she knows but refuses to face it, I don't know. I don't ask.

What I do know is the lab has created a kind of cat for her, a nanobot driven robot, exactly like Miro. I know it won't be the same, but it will be better than nothing. I also know how much resource de Pommier used to make the replacement Miro. It tells me something about the general, that she's not all bad. Somewhere inside her cold avatar, there's a woman's heart which still faintly beats.

But right now, de Pommier is eyeing me. I scan the system again. The order for my termination appears. In the reflection of the smartscreen, I see her watching me, narrow, waiting to see what I will do. I continue to process the data, feigning ignorance. Her stance relaxes slightly, and she looks away, asks one of the men to bring her a coffee. In that instant, I execute the command, and the shit hits the fan.

Alarms tear through the silence, and rip their way through the building, crescendoing and de-crescendoing, dozens of them, ugly and discordant. Ones I have never heard before. de Pommier looks up and as far as an avatar can look startled this one does. Like a deer in the headlights startled. For a heartbeat, she goes completely blank, as if de Pommier has cut the connection to her avatar, but no, it blinks. She's still there.

She doesn't even look at me. And deep inside I know this isn't me. It's too big, Then it hits me, what's happening as the monitors scream the truth, of the hell that has hit the world and is working its way towards us. Blue played us all. A stab of pride slams into me, for her cleverness, and her ability to keep this from me. She didn't even say goodbye to me this morning. Just kissed me and said: 'See you on the other side.'

On the monitors: Three days, twelve hours, fifty-three minutes, and twelve seconds continue their pointless countdown. I run a quick scan of the system, calculate at the speed of light we've got maybe seventy minutes left before the burning wall of destruction reaches us up here at the top of the world. She lied. To all of us. I never loved her more.

To her credit, de Pommier holds it together, the captain of a brutally sinking ship, along with all her hopes for humanity. She doesn't let her devastation show. Instead, she orders new commands, diverting everything the city has to support G-II, pivoting her hopes from Mars back to Earth in less than ten seconds flat.

I get up. My work here is done. I still have a card up my sleeve. It's not over for me and Blue yet, not by a long shot. de Pommier catches my sleeve as I pass her. I stop.

'You didn't know.' It's not a question.

I realise belatedly the command I executed has slipped entirely under her radar. The luck of it would be incredible if it were not for the magnitude of the cost.

I shake my head. 'Where is she?

'The lab,' de Pommier answers, her eyes unfocus for a moment, her attention yanked back to wherever she is. I realise I don't know where she is. She could be thousands of kilometres away in one of the other, lesser, cities. The thought sobers me, that she could be gone before the rest of us, the highest of Global Command's military leaders who tried to save humanity in the eleventh hour, while the rest only cared about their own selfish skin. The unfairness of it eats at me. But then, Global Command was never fair. I knew it when I was ordered to kill innocent people trying to survive what had been done to them by those who had the power to get away with it.

Her gaze fixes on me. 'The Elites have been shut down. All their data is gone. Everything.'

'Guilty.' I answer, though I feel none.

'You bastard,' she seethes. 'Do you realise what you've done to us?'

'Exactly what you deserve,' I say, and walk past her men who stand still as statues, the sheen of data in their eyes lost. They stare at me, blank, empty shells, disconnected from their central nervous system. It took a long time to find it, what I had begun to suspect in the early days of my new existence; when I sensed the brotherhood of our data-driven heartbeats aligning us like a hive of insects. Deep in the highest security files of the general's system, there it was: the holy grail I had hoped for—the system commands to shut down every single one of her lesser versions of me. They were de Pommier's pet project, I read it all, how she wanted to create something that could live forever, which made sense, considering she lived through her avatar. Anyway, betas would had to have been made before me. And now, the ones who could keep me from doing what I needed to do, were silenced, by the very thing she herself created.

I cut a look over my shoulder as I leave de Pommier's pointless war room, swarming with alarms, and the bleats of AI voices detailing feedback from the satellites, one screen after another bleeding red with warnings—as her precise, controlled world collapses around her. She glares at me, rank with hate, with powerlessness, probably the first taste of it she's had in decades. I can't help myself, through the din of our dying world, I smile and flip her the bird.